Ray's Widget Exchange

Ray's Widget Exchange is a project exploring the client-side of Django
website development. The intention is to provide tools, widgets, views
and other services that aren't appropriate for the Django core, but are
still essential for website development.

Initial goals:

We aim to provide a simple set of widgets that can be easily integrated into a
Django form:

A calendar widget

A numerical range widget

A time widget

An AJAX autocomplete widget

A color palette

full RGB selection

selection from subset of colors

Longer term goals:

Handle compression and aggregation of CSS and JavaScript artefacts. (Note by
Reinout: probably not, as an app should do only one thing:
compression/aggregation can be done by other apps).

Client-side input validation (possibly by Ajax callback?)

Installation

Ray's widget exchange depends on django-staticfiles as that's the best way at
the moment to handle css and javascript files. It is also, probably, going to
end up in one form or the other in Django 1.3.

django-rays' setup.py has an automatic dependency on django-staticfiles,
so installing django-rays automatically brings in django-staticfiles.

Add both rays and staticfiles to your settings file's
INSTALLED_APPS.

Django-staticfiles needs a bit of boilerplate. Django 1.3 ought to make this
unnecessary, btw. The official django-staticfiles documentation has more elaborate
information and there's also a blog post
with a more narrative explanation and example snippets.

In sites where you use django-rays, you will need to add a little bit of
django-staticfiles boiler plate code to your settings file

And in your urlconf, add something like this to the end of your
urls.py:

if settings.DEBUG:
# Add this also to the projects that use this application.
# It allows django-staticfiles to serve up the /media files
# in DEBUG mode.
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'', include('staticfiles.urls')),
)

In production, use the build_static management command to prepare all
static files for apache.

Development

For developers that want to use buildout, a small buildout.cfg that sets
up a development and testing environment is provided. Otherwise use your
regular virtualenv/pip setup, of course.

Run python bootstrap.py and bin/buildout to initialize the buildout
environment and to fetch all dependencies. Now you can check run tests with
bin/test.
You can setup a simple example project with bin/django syncdb. Now run
bin/django runserver to start the development server and point your
browser to http://localhost:8000/.